Copntinuing . . .
Hegel has an interesting comment in the Science of the Logic about tautology
that bears also on the relationship between everyday and scientific language
and reasoning: "When a crystalline form is explained by saying that is has
its ground in the particular arrangement which the molecules form with one
another, the fact is that the existent crystalline form is this very
arrangement that is adduced as ground. In ordinary life, these aetiologies,
which are the prerogative of science, count for what they are, tautological
empty talk. To answer the question, why is this person going to town, with
the reason, the ground, that it is because there is an attractive force in
the town which urges him in that direction, is to give the kind of reply
that is sanctioned in the sciences but outside of them counted as absurd."
(SL, Miller, p 458)
Dialectical materialism answers the question that Jay raises concerning the
origin of ideas and thereby what counts at true are as follows: "Upon the
different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises
an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments,
illusions, modes of thought and views of life. The entire class creates and
forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresonding
social relations. The single individual, who derives them through tradition
and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and starting
points of his activity." (Marx - 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte." The key
here is "different forms of property". Marx understood the periodization of
history in terms of "modes of production": the mode of production is not
simply the production of physical existnece of individuals, "Rather it a
definite form of activity of these individuals, a defnite form of expressing
their life, a definite mode of life on their part." The scale on which Marx
ABSTRACTLY organized the succession of modes of production was "the extent
to which each has developed its productive forces, the divsiion of labour
and internal intercourse." Division of labour being the most manifest
expression of the development of productive forces and "The various stages
of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms of
ownership" (Marx, German Ideology). The various stages of development of
the division of labour, the periodization of history, the organization of
time scales, and even more different mode of production impose specific
rhythms of life to which which individual and micro-social temporalities are
subordinated (after all, where does the pressure to a hurried pace of life
come from anyway?)
Now I'm sure some readers must be thinking (if anyone is still reading this
long post at all): this is the same old marxist cant we've always heard.
But notice that the theory of modes of production directly addresses the
issues that Jay points to as central to the entire problematic of emergence
and change; the issue of concerning time scales in terms of the
interrrelations between modes of production, social formation, and
historical stages. Unfortunately most people probably associate the
historical-materialist theory of modes of production with Stalin's
reification of 5 stages of history but Marx himself was much less rigid and
also explicitly recognized that the model of development that took place in
the Greek-Roman-European sequence did not apply to other areas of the world,
explicitly commenting that there was nothing special about the Greeks
compared to any other civilization, thereby undermining one of the bases of
19th century claims to intellectual superiority of the western tradition.
Rather, certain conditions in the history of the west (the specific form of
Western feudalism (arguably comparable with Japanese feudalism which did not
directly produce capitalism (no merchant only imperial cities)), internal
contradictions in feudalism connected with the development of cities and
merchant capital, cf. the Sweezy-Dobb debate) led to the development of the
capitalist mode of production in which the production of exchange value (or
simply value) comes to dominate. The capitalist mode of production became
the dominant mode of production at the world, destroying and subordinating
all other modes of production, due primarily to the greater development of
productive forces it allows--which of course includes the military force.
Military force, however, cannot by itself account for capitalism's spread,
although it is a significant factor in both the suppression of the movements
toward socialism that emerge directly from capitalism's contradictions as
well as the conquest of colonial markets and resources necessary for what
Marx called the expanded reproduction of capitalism, the subordination of
non-capitalist modes of production into the sphere of capitalist
circulation, which is likewise necessary to counteract the tendency of the
rate of profit to fall (no matter what Greenspan and the Fed do in the short
run).
This brings up the question of commensurability again. I recognize that Jay
is using the word in a metaphorical sense--the sort of metaphorical
extension to a domain where it cannot really lead to the formation of a
concept that tells us more about the object of inquiry. In his latest post,
Jay has clarified the metaphoricality of his usage and states: "I was trying
to say, to have later ideas supersede earlier ones if they really were
'commensurable' by which I mean culturally commensurable, talking about the
same matters within systems of terms of reference and assumptions that can
be put more or less in one-to-one correspondence. That certainly does
happen within the same cultural tradition over relatively short time
scales." But What does culturally commensurable mean? What is the common
scale against which to measure cultures? To what culture does that scale
belong? For what group does this framework of commensurability have
meaning?
Personally, having been trained as an anthropologist, I long ago realized
that the term "culture" in discourses about social phenomena discharges the
same functions as "ether" discharged in the discourses about physical
phenomena before Michelson performed his experiments. So I have even
greater difficulty with the notion of "cultural commensurability" than I
did with Jay's original statement. From the point of view of concept
formation, the notion seems to be something akin to pouring the empty into
the void.
My final comments on Jay's reflections (in the soon-to-come) concern the
locus of collective consciousness as class consciousness and thus the
question of the who of the group, the we of the us, through this route I
hope to effect a return to the question of the materiality of ideal which
constitutes one Ilyenkov's most significant, challenging, and problematic
contributions and which is an underlying theme of Peter's paper(s).
Paul H. Dillon
Paul H. Dillon
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